Ethiopia-Kenya

APC abandoned on the road to Addis.





Those crazy Ethiopian kids!!?! Why do they do it? Never could we figure out where this suicidal tendency to chase motorised vehicles came from. Were the parents to blame? Feeding them bed-time stories of Landrovers filled with jam donuts? Perhaps other travelers had been handing out pens, money and sweets by the truck load. But, country wide those nutty kids would pop up out of nowhere, having registered you on their farangi (foreigner) radar. Didn't seem to bother them that you might be in the process of poo-pooing or something like that. You either held on for the next rest stop (ha-ha, cause there aren’t any!) or you just dropped your strides and pretended that the 6 people watching you pass last nights injira weren’t actually there.


Just stopping for a minute


Fabio and Massimo my Italian buddies driving around Africa in a small plastic car seemed to have it even worse! Here's picture from their website.


Just to give you an idea about what to expect to encounter on Ethiopian roads, Steffan and Frank took these photos from their Landrover.



Here's a typical drivers eye view on the main road to Addis. As usual covered with people not watching where I am going.



In Khartoum, I had met a couple from Canada traveling in a Landcruiser who had knocked down a child who had run down to the road. Unfortunately the young girl died and there began the nasty business of meeting the family/village and deciding the amount of money to be paid out to the family as compensation. As it turned out, local police got involved, not to preserve the peace but to line their own pockets. They suggested that if the payment was made through them, and a 'commission' was paid to the police, they could lessen the amount to be paid. The couple paid the amount in full to the family. If you really want to know how much they paid you can email me to find out.


So apart from failed mission to find the famous Blue Nile Falls outside of Bahir Dar we had a nice road from Gondar all the way into Addis Ababa. Just as well, because Marcs bike was just about to break something very expensive.
So it transpired that the rear suspension of his bike blew up as well, just as mine had done in the Sudan. What did that mean for us? We waited in Addis Ababa for 3 weeks while parts were shipped from Germany. We stayed at the Baro Hotel, a famous overlander haunt and rooms rented by the hour type place, where we met a bunch of wacky characters including Manon who is traveling to the South Pole by tractor (unbelievable story!!)

Frank and Steffan going to Kenya to bring design to the slums of Nairobi (awesome photos)

I was surrounded by lots of good folk doing good stuff for humanity, I hadn't associated with such erstwhile folk... ever, so you’d think I’d relax my hardening attitude about the country. Unfortunately Addis can easily get the better of you. There are not many foreigners in there so your presence on the street always causes some kind of commotion. I became annoyed by the constant attention. All I wanted to do was buy some bits and pieces for the bike. Just a bloke who wanted some cheap bolts. In Addis I was spat on, abused, ripped off. Even to ask directions to find a shop would result in some kind of negotiation over how much this information was worth to me. I couldn't get into the mind-set of the locals. They seemed to be either overexcited by foreigners or replused by them or both. Also to walk in the street sometimes was an assault on the senses. I have never seen a place with so many deformed beggars who are just turned loose to make their living on the street. During a typical walk to the shops I might encounter anything from a naked lunatic frothing at the mouth, a blinded woman with no hands sitting on the footpath or hordes of fly-blown grubby kids. However, even the deformed beggars have mobile phones:




The constant demands for money/something/anything began to grate on me too. Even off the street. Once I fell into a discussion with two educated Ethiopians who believed that it was my duty as a European (I didn't bother to correct them, as I doubted they would see my point) to raise as much money as possible and bring it back to Ethiopia. They seemed oblivious to the fact that, amongst numerous other things, the road from Gondar to Addis was made by donated money. I know because I saw the signs. I put it to them that perhaps it was up to Ethiopians to rescue their own country. This idea was not received well: 'you have the money, why don't you just give it to us?'.

In short, I was looking forward to leaving Ethiopia. I had expected that everyone would be like Haile Gebresalassie the famous Ethiopian distance runner and all round good guy. In my experience there, I was somewhat disappointed. However things were conspiring to bring me back to Ethiopia possibly in the near future. During my stay at the Baro I had met Guy Weir who had introduced me to a NGO operating out of the UN buildings in Addis. They were looking for someone to assist them in a project coming up. I went to see them at the office, things went well, maybe I'll be going back to Ethiopia to work for a couple of months...


Last but not least, I met Pete and Kay Forwood, world record holders for traveling around the world on the same vehicle. At last count they've been to something like 160+ countries on their old Harley Davidson









Onwards to Kenya...


So finally Marc's suspension arrived from Germany and we were ready to roll out of AA. We left in the mid-afternoon and made it as far as Shashemene, which has it's own colony of international Rastafarians, but apart from that not much. It seems that the Ethiopian government gave some land to the Rastas in recognition of their belief that the saviour of the reggae movement was embodied by the Ethiopian emporer Haile Selassie who died in 1975. They wait patiently in their compound for the new king and liberator to be restored to the throne. Next day we were at the border town called Moyale, the begining of the infamous Marsabit road. We were warned that the road through northern Kenya would be hard. We were about to find out. It’s only 250kms to the next petrol station at Marsabit!

The Moyale area was in the middle of a serious drought.


Doesn't look too bad I thought. There's a sealed road... for the first 100m after the border gate anyway. So most people aren't really interested in a detailed account of the northern Kenyan road system, I think. However, that day I rode 160+kms on my footpegs. If you stand up on the bike, you transfer your weight to the footpegs which lowers the centre of gravity making the bike more stable. In theory. Also I didn’t have complete faith in my rebuilt suspension so I wanted to spread the weight between the two wheels as much as possible. Bloody tiring.





Just before Marsabit I realised my front tyre was punctured. As it turned out my spare tube was also punctured. We didn’t get moving again until well after nightfall, after plugging the hole with duct tape and superglue. We could hear hyenas calling out to each other in the darkness, thankfully upwind of us. In the past bandits had been quite active in this area so we took the precaution of hiding our critical documents and money reserves under a rock while we were in this somewhat exposed position. Several trucks passed us but didn’t think about stopping even though we tried to wave one down. You’re on your own in this part of the world.Some of the trucks that used the road during the day.


Marsabit was in the local news at this time as a military aircraft carrying several regional MP’s had crashed 2 days before, killing most of the occupants. We stayed on a farm owned by a Swiss expat called Henri. He recounted that he had been at home when the Chinese made transport crashed in bad weather a mile away from where we were standing. He pointed out to us a darkened spot of grass on the side of a hill. If the aircraft had 50m more elevation it looked like it would have been OK. He told us that he ran up to the crash site with some of his workers but when they arrived local people had already started to pull the wreckage off the hill using ropes, burnt bodies still strapped in their seats and all. So much for an investigation.

Still exhausted from the previous day we spent the next day hanging out in Henries pagoda, happy to be in quiet seclusion. There was no-one to bother us except the house cow complete with Swiss style neck bell. Well rested and keen to press on we rolled out the following morning expecting to reach Isiolo some 260kms away and the start of tarmac roads. To be honest I was quite enjoying the rugged roads as I had set up my bike to be as light as possible making it easier to handle once the going got a bit rougher.
However my buddy Marc was having a tough time of it, man-handling the big BMW all day. After 100kms we reached the small settlement of Laisamis and I noticed that I hadn’t seen Marc in a while, I back-tracked a couple of miles and found him unloading his bike on the side of the road. A broken frame, snapped in two places. So we set up a desert workshop under a sheet of plastic and Marc set about fixing his frame by drilling some holes without the help of a drill machine, and utilising some angled steel from a set of unwanted shelves he’d allegedly rescued from the rubbish bin at his work back in the UK.


Sad times...& happy times...


















We stayed 2 nights in the area including Easter Monday in the Catholic mission down the road run by Italian nuns. <
Eventually we made it to Nairobi a day later passing by Mt Kenya shrouded in clouds. The highlands around the mountain reminded me a lot of the north island of New Zealand or southern England. There is a 4 lane highway on the approach into Nai-robbery as it is sometimes known, but even this relatively familiar styled road held it’s own perilous pitfalls for the unwary traveler. Water filled potholes of uncertain depth, freeway speeds combined with dubious driving techniques made a for a hair raising entry into the smog of Nairobi, population somewhere between 3 or 4 million. No-one knows for sure. We arrived at our accommodations under GPS direction a little bit after dark. Marc checked his handy work, the temporary fix lasted exactly as far as Nairobi and had sheared off and a third crack had appeared in the frame. But his desert-fix had done well, much better than a similar problem encountered by a couple of moviestars in a recent documentary/sitcom about adventure motorcycling. They ‘fixed’ their problem with 2 tyre irons and some #8 fencing wire, I doubt that this would’ve lasted 1.5 minutes given the stress involved. But you can edit out lotsa stuff in the movies.

Time for a cut, too long under the helmet.